Review: Song Remains (Mostly) the Same in Rock Band 2

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: Gamemaker releases brilliant work of genius, follows it up next year with the same exact thing.

It happens all the time in the videogame biz — as soon as a publisher has a breakthrough hit on its hands, you can be sure it’ll want another version for next Christmas. And so, here’s Rock Band 2, just like clockwork. MTV Games hasn’t made any major changes to how the game looks or plays, so if you’ve spent any time tapping on plastic drums with a room full of virtual band mates recently, you know exactly how this one is going to go down.

But that doesn’t mean you don’t need Rock Band 2. Oh, quite the contrary: If you’re still getting your buddies together every few weekends to play the original, you absolutely must buy Rock Band 2 — for the new music, but also for the relatively minor but highly desirable improvements MTV has made.

I don’t want to seem like I’m diminishing the hard work that developer Harmonix Music Systems has clearly done here. No, the lads from Cambridge did not add new instruments to Rock Band: no keyboards, no sousaphones. No, unlike rival Guitar Hero, there is no new feature as nakedly ambitious as a music-creation mode. What they have done is to refine every feature from top to bottom for Rock Band 2, creating a true version 2.0 product.

But before we get into that, let’s assume you have never heard of Rock Band before. Let’s assume you have never experienced the joy of playing a music game that lets four players team up, taking lead guitar, bass, drums and vocals. Let’s assume you don’t know the sheer joy of cooperative music gaming, each player following their own part but contributing to a shared score. You are an incomplete person.

Music games are now one of the biggest genres in the industry, and Rock Band is the best of the bunch. Even though tapping out rhythms on the plastic buttons of fake guitars and drums isn’t really playing music, these games are so compelling because they make you feel like a rock star.

The Rock Band 2 disc features about 80 new songs to rock to, spanning a variety of styles. There’s AC/DC’s "Let There Be Rock" and Metallica’s "Battery," sure, but there’s also Bob Dylan, Fleetwood Mac and Blondie. There’s even "Shackler’s Revenge," a track off of Guns N’ Roses’ vaporware album, Chinese Democracy.

But what if you like your old Rock Band songs better? No matter: By re-upping the license fee with a flat payment of $5, you can export most of your Rock Band songs to your console’s hard drive. Rock Band 2 will then pull them straight into the game. All the music you downloaded forthe original Rock Band will work seamlessly with Rock Band 2 as well.

One of the welcome upgrades to Rock Band 2 is that the song-selection menu has been dramatically overhauled. Not only is it easier to find the song you want, but the difficulty level of each song is broken down by instrument. So, for example, if you have an expert guitarist playing with a beginning drummer, they’ll be able to pick songs that are appropriate for both of them.

The solo game has been more heavily altered. Instead of separate song-by-song single-player challenges for each instrument, everything has been smashed into one mode, called "World Tour." You’ll create a band, then take them from garage gigs to superstardom. You could only do this with multiple players in the first game, but the Tour experience is now seamlessly integrated across the entire game. You can begin a tour by yourself, switch instruments midway through, add more players at any time or go online and invite remote players to join your tour.

If you’re looking for a single-player experience that’s closer to the original’s, Rock Band 2 features "Tour Challenges," a series of increasingly difficult groups of songs that challenge you to use specific instruments. And then there’s "Battle of the Bands," challenges that Harmonix will constantly update through online delivery. Every day you log in, there will be a new challenge, and your scores will be compared to every other band’s.

But all of these new features are really just iterations on a theme, the same songs wrapped in different packaging. What grabs me most is the "Drum Trainer" feature. These aren’t songs. This is Harmonix’s attempt to turn Rock Band drummers into actual drummers by teaching them a variety of different beats. There are about 75 different drum beats that you can play on an infinite loop, and you can adjust the tempo on each. Master these, and you’ll be building real skills that transfer onto real drum sets. A "Fill Trainer" even teaches you cool little riffs to play when it’s time for a drum solo.

You can play Rock Band 2 with Rock Band or Guitar Hero instrument controllers, but a new guitar and drums have been released specifically for this game. Both new input devices are wireless, which is especially welcome with the drum controller, which also sports a metal-reinforced kick pedal and bouncier, quieter drum pads this time around.

If this is one of those unfortunate game reviews that reads just like a list of features, that’s as much Rock Band 2‘s fault as it is mine. Rock Band 2 is a massive bullet-point list of new features, each of which makes playing the game a little bit more fun, a little bit less annoying. MTV has played it very safe: It has not broken anything, but neither has it taken any great risks to add any feature that is mind-blowingly new, the way it did when it added drumming and vocals to Guitar Hero in the first place.

It’s more than enough to make Rock Band 2 worth a purchase, but I’ll still have my eyes open for the next big thing in music games.